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the question lies within
2003-05-04 19:58:41
to the anonymous (nonmember/non-logged-in) seeker who left the bug report on video #34: why bother? didn't you read the entry? THIS IS NOT A GOOD OR EVEN REMOTELY REPRESENTATIVE SH VIDEO. IT BITES. If this wasn't a database for listing every AMV ever created, I might not even have owned up to spending my time on it.
just quick jottings.....a fuller entry on Friday's activities & the stir of the weekend will go up tomorrow if I can steal some time at work. I'm cycling up hardcore on Java and XML, but I'm a little shaky on beans and the whole EJB bag, but nobody will expect me to be excessively productive on the first day, and the setup is a little different from anything most people with beans experience in a non-heavy-industry context are going to be familiar with. Adapting shouldn't be much of a problem tho....a channel is a channel, a protocol is still a protocol, and a module is still a module.
Current videos: Bill O'Brien, "Old Shoes", Gamma Ray, "A While In Dreamland" and "Farewell", and Borknagar, "The View of Everlast", all to Haibane Renmei. Progress check: 59%, 55%, 59% and 55%. Expected catalog numbers: #75, #76, #77, #78. Finished the finishing on these Saturday; I should probably be able to clip through the next ep tomorrow night. I've got an ep render going right now, which is kinda hogging processor time. If my work box has a zip drive things will go a little faster on ep renders; I may be able to do a different series for club as well as Recca before I ship out. Or more of the same, if I can get ahold of beyond ep 15.
--Kai out
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breathing in breathing out
2003-05-02 09:00:17
Awright! Actual video progress! Stats follow.
Russian Ark was cool last night, but Meg and I either have to learn to calm down or start going to stupider, less complicated movies together. Probably the first.....it's not good to get in love-love mode, then start smashing your head against the back of the seat in front of you when you just can't take the latest Hollywood idiocy anymore. I'm seeing her again today, then we repair to club in company of some of her friends.
I'm a little worried about introducing her and her circle to my fellow backbenchers; she met most of them at AniBo, but the situation at club is always different and often stranger. And then there are the people who are even too weird for *us* to associate with.........
Current videos: Bill O'Brien, "Old Shoes", Gamma Ray, "A While In Dreamland" and "Farewell", and Borknagar, "The View of Everlast", all to Haibane Renmei. Progress check: 57%, 53%, 57% and 53%. Expected catalog numbers: #75, #76, #77, #78. I got a nice early start clipping this morning (and through ep 9), because I knew I was going to be heading in early. A little less source than I've been getting (maybe like 2.5 minutes), but at current levels, any source I can get is being completely counted for overage. Managing the first video is going to be pure hell; I'll be looking for optimal clips in a selection of probably about 800-1000. After that it gets easier since used clips are discarded from future selection.
And that FLASCO thing was, indeed, too good to be true. Amazingly, it was both airsoft AND a scam. This company used to call itself Flash Distribution and got an ugly name for itself in the Class III community for passing off airsoft weapons as real guns and then not sending them to those who ordered them. It's too bad, really, because if they really were selling AEG Uzi and MAC-10 types at those kinds of prices, a lot of airsoft aficionados would snap them right up. You just can't buy AEGs for under $100, and if you want a decent selection, you have to pay insane shipping fees to get them from Hong Kong. Example: I ordered a Marui EBB Centimaster and a 2500-count bag of Excel 6mm from Red Wolf Airsoft (no relationship to the dude who runs the AMV DC). Gun and ammo together were like $50, and shipping was like $35 on top of that. Too much, too far.
Good American airsoft retailers basically don't exist. Generation has been having some problems getting their act together, but they'd have a good selection if there was a way to browse it. 747 Imports has it together, but they're pretty much a Tokyo Marui factory store. Normally this aint that bad (Marui has a hell of a line selection), but my next gun is probably going to be a Maruzen M712 Mauser (Jin-Roh nut that I am)...meaning another order to Southeast Asia.
These Japanese companies should let overseas customers buy factory direct. There's no need for everything to be routed through a middleman retailer in a third country, and with credit card billing there's no need for currency conversion. If for some reason you want to feel how it was like to be an anime otaku ten-fifteen years ago, get into airsoft. If you think you're paying too much to hit-or-miss obscure retailers for too little NOW......
--Kai out
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lay down the laws with our satanic scripts
2003-05-01 12:21:57
Errr....still no immediate video progress. I've finally gotten that tape release done, but I won't have much time today/tonight to start clipping another ep, and tomorow is also doubtful. Next week should get me a lot closer to the end of the tunnel, even with working during the day. It's all a matter of using time intelligently.
Right now I'm more wasting time, trying in vain to find out more information about a company called FLASCO operating out of Montrose, Colorado. Why? Because they have a deal in the back of a recent Guns & Ammo issue that is patently too good to be true.
This company claims to be selling "movie" military rifles and pistols, nearly all in .25 caliber, for extremely low prices, including Uzi- and MAC-10-styled weapons that operate on full auto -- for respectively $60 and $50 apiece. No permit or FFL required. Call me stupid, but I've always been told that anything capable of firing real ammo on full-auto is a machine gun, aka a Class III weapon, and thus subject to some severe regulations. If it's made after 1986, it's illegal to sell to civilians. If not, it's obsessively expensive and requires an indecent amount of tax and paperwork to do any kind of legal transfer.
Even so, the whole point of the very first major gun control act, of 1968, was to keep people from buying modern weapons through the mails (stimulated by the Kennedy assassination, in which Oswald bought his weapon from a catalog from a store in Chicago). There's something not right about this. Either it's airsoft (eminently possible) or it's a scam.
The prices seem to indicate airsoft, but really, you can't buy even airsoft versions of those weapons that cheap. Definitely not full-auto, which means AEG, and a price floor somewhere around $150. Also, the ammo they're offering is too expensive; $10 for 200 rounds (pretty much par for the course for low-cal centerfire ammo). Even with shipping from Asia, you won't pay much more than $20 for 2000 Excel 6mm BBs. So it's probably a scam, or some kind of Federal entrapment thing, trying to see who's stupid enough to try to buy machine guns for fifty bucks plus shipping.
I could write for a catalog, and see if they just sucked up the five bucks without a reply, but I don't have the cash to rent a post box and don't want my current address deluged with right-wing junk mail like happened the last time I ordered something from a mil-surplus catalog. On the extreme off chance that anyone who might be reading this has had dealings with this company, any info at all would be appreciated. It would be cool to own a low-caliber oughta-be-Class-III-but-for-some-reason-fully-legal weapon, but not cool enough to justify the hassle of getting ripped off or grilled by BATF enforcers if this offer really is too good to be true.
I should be getting back on pace with regard to video work soon; my hair and firearms issues rather than AMV progress stats make for crappy topicality in this record.
--Kai out
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bullets from hell
2003-04-29 18:05:02
Well, I finally did it. On or about 3:00 PM EDT today, the long, greasy, glorious, pain-in-the-ass metal skullmane I had been growing for the last nearly four years finally went under the knife. It's still hard to believe that I no longer have a pound and a half of scalp-oil-slicked keratin hanging over my back any more. But, truth be told, my hair did its bearer proud; it did not go, as Amon Amarth have said, "without a vicious fight".
First, the barber had to get all the water out of my hair, which has an unusual tendency to alternately shed water (under brief exposure) or hold it forever (when soaked). Probably due to the excessive grease. Then, problem two: how to remove the ponytail in a suitable state for donation to a cancer-wig charity. They tried a straight razor, but my hair defeated it. Then a pair of normal scissors, and a second when those failed. It took at least a full minute for the second pair of scissors to work all the way through the bundle, cut after cut after cut. At this they thought the hard part was over, but when they finally got around to trimming the top, they quickly learned that normal electric trimmers are no match for the cerebral pelt of a True Metal Rager, and were forced once again to go back to muscle and steel.
This is a big part of the reason I went almost four years without a haircut. I liked my old hair, but I like my new hair as well; it's just that my hair biologically is thick, tough, oily, prone to matting, and generally drives the people who have to cut it berserk. And the prices are nothing to burp at either: what the hell ever happened to "shave-and-a-haircut, six bits"? Even I can remember when a trim was under ten bucks. More old-fart blabbing.
I don't start work till Monday, after all, but I've got a bunch of stuff to work on to fill up the time. I'll be done the Recca-output bit by this time tomorrow, and should be able to get back cracking on the video. Ofcourse, Meg and I are going to see Russian Ark Thursday, and then ofcourse Friday is club, but there's a lot of time left even around those.
Somehow, things will go forward. And somehow, I'll be able to fit in having a life. As for now, I've got short hair, Java to study, and a King Diamond album to review.
Offtopic:
Club included the first four of X TV last time, and I was amazed at how homoerotically WRONG this series can come off as when you have several rows of fangirls giggling to cue you in. I've seen these eps before (alone) and totally did not catch some of the skull-twistingly WRONG things that Fuma says while holding Kamui in even more WRONG positions. But hey; these girls sat through ALL SIX EPISODES OF PHOTON (two hours of boobs and stupidity, for the uninitiated) with the rest of us, they're entitled to a little shonen-ai.
Hopefully, the less-well-socialized among the membership will not press for a retribution showing of, say, Agent Aika, in their lack of understanding and unease of their own sexuality. That would be truly horrible.
--Kai out
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the undetermined few
2003-04-28 19:28:47
Not much video work lately....library processing is hogging my cycles. I did have to install new DivX, but that aint the real problem.
Curses on #animeforever. Not only did these idiots use a screwy audio format so I have to process the eps into uncompressed-audio to do proper TMPEG output, but they put the goddamn subs right on the bottom of the frame; no overscan leeway AT ALL, so I have to generate that myself. AND they didn't use the classic Shinsen Gumi translations. Sure, it SAYS translated by Shinsen Gumi in the opening credits, but the translation has been drastically changed. 'Madogu' is now untranslated; what the hell was wrong with 'elemental weapon'? Plus a hundred other places where the high-flying, shoot-from-the-hip style of the translation really made the anime. It may not have always been the most accurate rendition, but it captured the kick-ya-in-the-teeth-and-laugh spirit of Recca perfectly.
Or maybe I'm just a cantankerous old fart. But then again, the new digisub translation of Guru Guru sucks huge eggs compared to the Group Virelai version, even though a bunch of things are a little clearer. Down with time-pressed digisubs, up with fansubs where people can actually have the time to get stylistic elements right.
What the hell ever, it aint my problem to do more than output these to tape.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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